Ubuntu

distribution release

Maintenance updates will be provided for 5 years for Ubuntu Desktop,Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud, Ubuntu Core, Ubuntu Kylin, Edubuntu, and
Kubuntu. All the remaining flavours will be supported for 3 years.

Users of Ubuntu 12.04 will soon be offered an automatic upgrade to 14.04.1 via Update Manager. For further information about upgrading,
see:

development release

Development Release: Ubuntu 14.10 Alpha 2
[Ubuntu] Iain Lane has announced the availability of the second alpha release of Ubuntu 14.10, code-named “Utopic Unicorn”.
As with the first alpha, only Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu GNOME and Ubuntu Kylin have opted to release CD/DVD images for testing.

Les rapports entre équipes ubuntu et debian

Apaisés ?

We'll see, Matt Zimmerman a potpourri of mirth and madness Ubuntu is based on Debian unstable

From time to time, I see someone remark that Ubuntu uses packages from Debian unstable, and that they don’t think this is a very good idea. I would like to explain why we do this and how it works, and hope that this will enable a less one-sided view of the subject.

Debian is well known and regarded as a product, the Debian system itself. In addition to this end product, the Debian community produces a variety of useful by-products. One of the most celebrated is Debian “unstable”, which despite its unglamorous name is an incredible achievement. It represents the collective work of a vast number of developers, who package and maintain essentially all of the free software available.

Put simply, Debian unstable provides immediate access to anything you could want from the free software world. It’s all there, updated daily with the latest and greatest releases. As if that weren’t great enough, the components are continuously integrated, so that problems become evident right away and can be fixed quickly.

Debian doesn’t “release” unstable directly; it’s an intermediate stage in their process. The Debian release team selects components which they believe are ready to release, and place them in “testing”, which is the next stage in the process. However, many people, developers especially, use unstable as their primary operating environment. They drink from the firehose of free software, delivered daily by Debian.

Ubuntu was created in a similar spirit, but with significantly different goals. We wanted to release a complete product much more frequently and regularly. We wanted to focus on desktop users, and provide a system which met their specific needs, even if this meant serving some other needs less well. In this way, we created a complement to Debian, as many others had done before us.

What we did differently was to choose unstable as the basis for this work. There are many other distributions based on Debian, but at the time, they were mostly derived from a particular release. Debian would make a release, then someone else would take this and produce a customized version of it. The problem was that these customized versions would become outdated as Debian continued to develop. Bringing them up to date with Debian’s latest work required a lot of effort, particularly as Debian’s releases were sometimes years apart with massive changes between them.

Basing Ubuntu on Debian unstable meant keeping up. We would continually merge in the latest code from Debian, keeping Ubuntu closely in sync. While this was sure to be a lot of work, it provided us with access to all of the pre-packaged software we would need to produce Ubuntu, freshly delivered every day. Instead of duplicating this work, we could build on it.

We would, of course, need to do our own release management, and make decisions about what was ready to ship, just as Debian’s release team did. We couldn’t reuse their work, because we needed to make different decisions in order to suit our distinct release cycle and provide the desktop experience we wanted.

These decisions reflected some of the key advantages of free software. We could get the benefits of a custom solution without having to reinvent every wheel. We could focus on the pieces which mattered most to us, and use stock components everywhere else. We showed that this applied to open processes as well as open source code.

This is why, and how, Ubuntu was based on Debian unstable. It was, quite simply, the best tool for the job, and still is today.

jef spaleta
This explanation talks to the motivation and position of the Ubuntu Desktop project as a derivative of the Debian process using Debian unstable as the starting point for differentiation for a fast moving Desktop product.

What about the Ubuntu Server product? Can you explain why Canonical feels its appropriate to base Ubuntu server from Debian Unstable?

Or for that matter the LTS releases. The LTS releases have the same pre-release testing period that the non-LTS releases use.. but they are supported for far longer.

Both the LTS and Server concepts were introduced into Ubuntu after the original rationale for basing on Debian unstable was constructed.
I’ve never seen an cohesive explanation as to why its equally valid to use the same differentiation starting point for LTS and Server releases as it is for a fast moving Desktop product.

jg
First of all, Canonical runs Debian unstable through its own set of “customizing scripts” that change some behavior of the resulting distro.
Canonical then _doesn’t_ test those changes against _all_ of the packages in Debian’s repositories. Unlike Debian, Canonical does _not_ have the sheer number of talented developers to do that, in an atmosphere supporting completely unfettered interaction. That’s why, for example, Hardy broke the Debian package for the MidiSport drivers. Canonical applied changes to Debian unstable, and obviously didn’t test those changes against that (and many more) Debian packages.

Secondly, your citing of the Canonical “Code of Conduct” is laughable. There are a large number of “destructive” people on Canonical’s forums, and they’re called “Ubuntu fanbois”. Some of them are moderators. For example, I’ve seen a moderator lock a thread, then reopen the thread for a few seconds in order to allow a someone to post an inflammatory comment, and then immediately relock the thread. I’ve seen moderators, who can barely write intelligible english, moderating english language forums. I’ve seen moderators, who have absolutely no technical expertise, destructively moderating discussions they don’t even understand. Ubuntu’s CoC is a disaster, a joke, and a sham. It doesn’t produce nearly as good results as Debian’s community.

If you wrote the above blog to try to convince yourself that you’re doing the right thing, that’s your prerogative. If you wrote it to convince others, then you’re fooling no one.